Study suggests Microsoft’s ‘Bing-it-on’ claims are false [updated]

Surprise! It turns out that people who take Microsoft’s “Bing it on” challenge don’t actually prefer Bing to Google by a rate of 2-to-1. Yale Law School professor Ian Ayres, writing over at Freakonomics, says that he and his students recently conducted their own third-party studies using Microsoft’s own “Bing it on” website to determine whether Internet users really did think that Bing retrieved better search results than Google when presented with a Coke/Pepsi-style “blind taste test.” The results, Ayres found, actually showed the opposite.

“To the contrary of Microsoft’s claim, 53% of subjects preferred Google and 41% Bing (6% of results were ‘ties’),” he writes. “This is not even close to the advertised claim that people prefer Bing ‘nearly two-to-one.’ It is misleading to have advertisements that say people prefer Bing 2:1 and also say join the millions of people who’ve taken the Bing-It-On challenge, if, as in our study, the millions of people haven’t preferred Bing at a nearly a 2:1 rate.”